Paper short abstract:

This study examines the historical development of sound cinema in Japan by focusing on the nation's contact and negotiation with the Western world. A film producer Kido Shiro's visit to Europe and the US will be discussed, along with the discourse analysis of Japan's early view of sound cinema.

Paper long abstract:

Cultural flow and negotiation beyond national and regional boundaries have become a major subject in contemporary media studies. East Asia, including Japan, is a prominent example, where popular culture, while produced, distributed and consumed at transnational scale, also raises complex issues regarding localization and appropriation.

Previous studies in this field suggest two important questions to be further discussed. Firstly, the role of the West in the development of East Asian popular culture. While the cultural hegemony of the West with a unidirectional influence on the East has been largely redressed, there still exists ambiguity about how the two regions negotiate at the juncture of cultural flow. Secondly, a need for a historical approach to theorize popular culture on a regional scale. Combining these two methodologies, Daisuke Miyao successfully investigated the influence of Hollywood style on Shochiku films in the 1920s.

In this paper, I will expand the scope suggested above into the early history of sound cinema in Japan in order to elucidate the way how the new technological advancement resulted from complex processes involving direct contacts with the West. As a case study, I will discuss an observation tour of Kido Shiro, the head of Shochiku Kamata Studio, around several Western countries (USSR, Germany, Italy, Spain and US) from 1928 to 1929. Using biographical sources, industrial archives, and journalism reports, I will analyse how this unusual probe into the Western film industry by a Japanese producer exerted influence on the making of the Japanese sound cinema. This will also be counter-examined by the contemporary discourses on sound cinema appearing in Japanese media in the late 1920s, when the new cinematic form was recognised both as a foreign import and a technical challenge to resolve.

This study will not only present a historical example of how popular culture can shape its form through inter-regional contact and negotiation, but also suggest a critical insight into the matter of overcoming 'parochial regionalism' that dichotomizes the East and the West, and finding a more creative process of appropriation ('provincialization' as Iwabuchi Koichi puts) in the current globalised media sphere.